Abstract: Methods, systems, and computer program products for automatically transforming data or business messages to enable communication between parties in a distributed computing environment (e.g. between business partners who exchange data over a public network, and who do not necessarily use the same data formats), where this data transformation preferably occurs at the edge of the computing network. A set of transformation services is described, and include template registration, transformation, forward, and receive services. Services from this set may optionally be combined to create composite transformation services. A template defines how to transform one data format into another. Selection criteria may be provided to enable dynamically selecting a template at run-time.